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I know it's Wednesday and I know it says TFF, but I told you you're getting 5 spooky stories and it's not my fault Halloween is in the middle of the week. Today, kids, I bring to you something totally spooky that I have never seen, but would love to (I can't get my husband talked into it).

The Hornet Light. The what's-it, I hear you asking. Hornet. Light. Also known as the Spooklight, which is a mysterious sphere of light that floats off the ground. It 'roams' on a stretch of land called The Devil's Promenade, supposedly named because if you cross this section of land a certain number of times, the Devil will appear. It's between the Missouri and Oklahoma border.

The earliest recorded sighting of the Spooklight is 1881, but there are rumors of it during the Trail of Tears and Civil War. Some people say it's two young Indian lovers searching for one another.They forged a suicide pact because the princess's father would allow the couple to ma…

I told myself I was going to finish my WIP this weekend. It was 7000 words to the finish, which is nothing when you think about it. Just a nice black moment and a resolution. Easy peasy.

Okay, I have a problem and I recognize that I have a problem, so therefore I can work on resolving the problem. Denial is my key defense mechanism, but sometimes I'm ready to face my fears and recognize my issues.

I make plans and set schedules and generally try to function like a writer who knows what she's doing. If you've been following along, you're aware that there are 5 books in the L&L series. Or there will be. #1 came out in February. #2 came out last month. #3 is scheduled to hit virtual shelves in March (um, it's looking more like April), #4 in the fall of 2013 and #5 in spring 2014. I've been working hard on writing #4. I've had problems with #4 from the beginning. Some of it (most of it) was because the hero was not to hero-y. It's a long story about wh…

I mentioned Vance Randolph in the first Ozarkian spook tale. He was well-known in the area as a collector of folklore and mythology. Today I'm going to tell you about the booger dog (laugh it up, I know what you're thinking). This is what he had to say on the subject:

One of my best friends told me seriously that as a little boy in McDonald county, Missouri, he once met a spotted hound that was bigger than a cow, and made tracks in the snow nearly two feet across. At the time he was astounded that a dog should attain such a size, but it never entered his head that there was anything supernatural about the animal. It was years later, when he came to realize that there were no such dogs anywhere in the world, he knew that he had seen a "booger dog."

It's entirely possible that the booger dog, also referred to as a hellhound, is a myth brought to the Ozarks from our Scotch-Irish ancestors. A couple of years ago there were several sightings of a hellhound in the Ozar…

Descent of Blood, The Red Veil Series, The PrequelWhen times are darkest, some vampires desire more than blood …
England, 1465. Mortal men clash in the War of the Roses for the English crown, while vampire warriors’ move undetected among their ranks, savoring the flow of blood that battlefields provide.
Vampire prince, Severian Pearce, fears the revelation of the immortal clans to humankind should King Henry fall from power. While in pursuit of Henry’s enemies, Severian comes to the aid of Meridian Neville, a human woman he craves—and not for the scent of her blood … Meridian is torn between honoring her father’s dying wish and her unexplainable yearning for Lor…

Where are we? Oh, okay, the third week of spooky Ozarkian tales. Excellent.

Late one night a drunk was on his way home after being at a pretty wild shindig. He got lost on the road home and walked into a cemetery. The sky was getting cloudy, there was no moon and the wind was whistling through the trees. After some stumbling around he thought he heard his name.

He just knew it was the devil calling for him because the preacher always said what a sin drinking was. So he started to run and fell into a deep hole. The voice called his name again--right next to him! It was pitch black and he couldn't see a thing.

After a moment his eyes adjusted and he saw a dark shape sitting by him. It said his name again and when he jumped up, it said, "You can't get out."

So frightened by this creature, he jumped six feet out of the hole, landed on the edge, and ran for home, vowing never to drink again.

From inside the hole, his friend sighed. Earlier in the day some men had been di…

What's your book/current WIP about?
Amazon is first and foremost, a romance--it’s the love story between Bianca and Jack, both Guardian werewolves from neighboring packs. However, it’s also about family and destiny, and finding a place, and the struggles that are faced when trying to enact social change.

Care to share your favorite line(s) from your story?
One of my favorite lines is actually one of the earliest hints at how Bianca feels about being “the chosen one.” She and Jack are talking, and he brings up their eventual mating, and he says something about how they haven’t used the word “mate” yet, and isn’t it a big deal. Bianca, totally deadpan, looks at him and says something like “well, you might have noticed that I’m kind of a big deal.”

What's your next project?
The next book I have coming out is a novella called “Shifter’s Dance” which was written for Musa Publishing’s shared world series “The Wiccan Haus.” Shifter’s Dance is the story of a ballet dancer who is blinded…

I don't have any pictures for you today except the one I call dummy dogs. It's Mungo on the left and Stormy on the right doing their best to look cute and innocent. I assure you . . . they are not. It's a ploy to get food. Okay, they're kind of cute, especially together.

I don't have any pictures because I didn't really do anything this weekend. It was miserable and rainy Friday and mostly cloudy Saturday, so it wasn't really ideal for doing much outdoors. I went to the library and wrote about 2,000 words. That brought me up from 66,000 to 68,000.

Went home and was really bored, so I thought, ah I might as well try to get something else done. It never occurred to me to edit The Turncoat's Temptress. When I reached 70,000 I decided to call it good for the night. I should be able to finish that last 10k in a week or two. As I've mentioned before, our DVD player/VCR combo has finally gone completely out of its mind. It's way past time to get a new…

Taily-Poo
There once was a hunter who had three hounds. It was a lean fall and he'd been all over the countryside trying to catch game so he and the dogs could eat. One evening he was hunting a rabbit. He thought he missed and when he went to search if he'd hit it or not, he saw a strange shape peering out of the bushes. Its eyes glowed red and it had a long, bushy tail. Hungry, he shot at it and managed to shoot its tail off. The creature howled and ran away, but left it's severed appendage behind. The hunter took the tail home and boiled it up into a nice stew.

As he drifted off to sleep that night, stomach full, he heard a rustling and scratching in the chimney. Jerking awake, he saw the red glowing eyes and heard a voice say, "Give me back my taily-poo!"

He jumped out and bed and sicced the dogs on the creature, which scuttled up the chimney. The dogs were gone for a while and when they came back …

You see, kids? I promised photographs and I delivered. Would I lie to you? Don't answer that. FarmFest was last weekend as well, so I bring to you as a token of my generosity, cute photos of animals as well as the lake.

There you are, some stuff to look at on a dull, dreary (at least here) Thursday morning. Come back tomorrow for The Friday Five, which is actually just a Friday one, but I promise you another Ozarkian spooky tale!

What's your current WIP about?
Red Hot is an very hot romance about a witch that falls for a dyed in the wool geeky scientist.

Care to share your favorite line(s) from your story?
Shut up Rhian. Just shut the fuck up and hope he leaves with a shred of interest instead of terror in his bones that you are going to stalk him.

What's your next project?
I have a Young Adult series that I'm working on and a middle grade book that is almost complete.

Describe your writing in a sentence.
Some days frantic, other days relaxed and cruisey. Depends on the muse.

Do you choose character names or do the characters whisper them in your ears?
They tend to shout to be heard over all the other voices in my head.

Plotter or panster?
Oh definite pantser.

Do you like background noise or do you prefer a quiet space when you write?
As I write this, my DH has Bathurst 1000 screaming on the television, but there are days when I love the quiet. I can write anywhere.

Of all the rude things! I didn't have a post yesterday! Well, that's because it was Columbus Day here in the States. You know, the one where white people celebrate the doom of red people. Or something like that. In 1792, America celebrated 300 years of discovery. In 1892, America celebrated 400 years of (because nothin' says 'patriotic' like slaying your red brethren). It became an official national holiday in 1937. Never mind that America was discovered by wandering nomads and Vikings first.

So what was I doing on my big day off? We went to the lake. I got you pictures, but I didn't put the on my flash drive. Sorry! It's been chilly here the last week or so, but the temps hit about 60-ish yesterday (we're shooting for 70 today). There wasn't much boat traffic on the lake and it made for some lovely scenes that you can't see right now.

I also hit 60,000 words on my WIP (currently titled The Siren's Suitor). The heroine, Emer, has just taken…

You can thank Melissa Limoges for inspiring this post. She got me thinking about Yokum silver the other day. Long story, but you can read about it in this interview. I was thinking about legends to put into a post, but then I got the bright idea to tell you one Ozarkian ghost story every Friday until Halloween (which is on a Wednesday). So no TFF, yes 'pook haint story.

I'm a huge fan of Vance Randolph and he's sort of the inspiration behind the hero of The Turncoat's Temptress, Basil Tinwhistle. Mr. Randolph was a folklorist who spent a great deal of time studying Ozarkian myth and legends. This story is in one of his books.

Raw Head and Bloody Bones
Raw Head and Bloody Bones is one story that always stuck out to me as holy crap, what kind of moonshine inebriated psycho thought this up?! It's about an old woman who was a witch that had an Arkansas razorback as a pet. Her house was full of magical herbs and folks believed that the razorback she called Raw Head was …

BLURB:
When an insecure, bi-racial woman begins a cloak-and-dagger love affair with a Japanese American man, she is intent on keeping her bigoted family in the dark—albeit with devastating consequences.

On the night of her brother’s murder, Deena Hammond stumbles upon Takumi Tanaka, lost and on the wrong end of a .32. After rescuing him from the certain fate driving through the hood in a Porsche will bring, a sweet kind of friendship begins. A balm for her grief. Maybe, Deena likes to think, it happened the day her white mother killed her black father. Or maybe, it was always a part of them, like DNA gone bad. Whatever the case, Deena knows that her family would never approve, hell, never acknowledge her fast-growing love for Takumi. And had he never…

The only thing I can say is, crap last week was long and the end was stressful. And now my DVD player doesn't work, which really sucks, but I'm coping.
Saturday I was in the doldrums and to be honest, the weather is part of it. It's been so cloudy here lately that it drags me down and makes me tired. So I went to the library with the intention of adding a whole bunch of words to my WIP. I sat there for about four hours, but didn't reach my goal before my computer battery threatened to quit on me. When I got outside I was like, it's only 1 pm, what do I do now?
My brain went dut, dut, dut, dut . . . Nature Center! I was like, yeah, brain, that's it! The Springfield Nature Center! Because by then the sun was shining. So I took me a little drive up to Springfield, missed the exit, of course, then found it again and pulled into the parking lot. I've been there before, but never on the trails. So here are some photos of a pretty cool nature trail.
The top phot…